Anti-Russian sanctions to produce no effect craved by US — senior diplomat

No type of sanctions, either the ones that have been introduced or the others that will be enacted as part of new legislation, will produce any effect craved by Washington, says Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov

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Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov

MOSCOW, April 04. /ITAR-TASS/. Any kind of sanctions against Russia will not bring about an effect craved by Washington, as such methods were appropriate in the 19th century, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Friday.

“It’s well known that President Obama has just signed a law spelling out the sanctions against Russia,” he said. “In this connection, we have to state that the US Administration remains entrapped by its own erroneous approaches and is guided by the fictitious notions about what happened in Ukraine and in Crimea and where the way out of the Ukrainian crisis is to be found.”

“It is clear as daylight that no type of sanctions - either the ones that have been introduced or the others that will be enacted as part of new legislation will produce any effect craved by Washington,” Ryabkov said.

“Highly troublesome is the fact that the veil of phraseology endorsed in Washington at top level doesn’t make it possible for our US counterparts to see the reality cannot be changed, and the reality is that the absolute majority of people living in Crimea has taken an irrevocable decision to reunify with Russia,” Ryabkov said.

“Unilateral exterritorial sanctions are illegitimate in principle and they are not recognized under common international law,” he said. “We believe they are a fixture from the past epochs.”

“We’d like to stress that Washington, which has a fancy for discussing on whether Russia is on the right or on the wrong side of history and which is repeating the endless about an isolation our country has allegedly fallen into, is itself entrapped by foreign policy methods and approaches retrieved straight out of the 19th century,” Ryabkov said.

“US officials are trying to impose their fallible approaches doomed to failure on many other members of the international community,” he said.

The Ukrainian problem was discussed Wednesday at a session of the Council of CIS Foreign Ministers. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said after its completion that the controversies, the elimination of which would predestine the settlement of the crisis in Ukraine, were an exclusively interior Ukrainian phenomenon.

“These controversies stem from the inability of the Ukrainian powers to show respect for the rights and freedoms of all the Ukrainians without exception, for the rights of ethnic minorities,” Lavrov said, adding that the incumbent authorities in Kiev are unable to display a genuine, not precarious, respect for the interests of all regions of the country.

He is confident that the Ukrainian government should take on the burden of a true rather than cosmetic constitutional reform and the West should stop interference in Ukraine’s domestic affairs in the role of a ruler of destinies of a country where the government is notorious for being self-sufficient.